Our development team work with Borland C++ Builder 6 and CodeGear C++ Builder 2007 (as well as Visual Studio). I hear a lot of comments that the Builder 2007 IDE crashes a lot more than BCB6 does. Does anyone out there have any experience of the C++ Builder 2009 IDE yet, particularly with a decent size application, and if so how does this compare with 6 or 2007 in terms of overall robustness?
I haven't used C++ Builder 2009 but maybe this will help you.
According to Chris Pattinson (QA manager at CodeGear), they made over 4000 fixes in both Delphi and C++ Builder 2009 (See this blog: http://blogs.codegear.com/chrispattinson/2008/09/19/38897)
He links to an article on cn.codegear.com which details all of the fixes for C++ Builder, see http://dn.codegear.com/article/38715
My experiences with BCB2009 so far have been mostly positive. the IDE seems stable and installs etc are much faster.
However, I haven't yet moved a major project over to 2009, but I can almost guarantee you it will be non-trivial because of the Unicode changes. You will need to switch to new versions of any third-party libraries/components that you use, as well as sanity-checking all string use in your existing code. There are no 'best practice' guidelines for doing this yet, either.
Of course, if you were not using the VCL, this wouldn't be a problem - but then, why would you use BCB...?